Sammy "The Bull" Gravano Case: Betraying the Gambino Crime Family

Paul Castellano was considered one of the most powerful men in New York City.

He was an American crime boss who headed the Gambino family.

If you don't know much about the mafia and mobs, which I don't, very basically put, the Gambino family was one of five families, groups, mobs, that really had taken over New York City in the sort of 1950s onwards.

So this case isn't actually about Paul, the man who was murdered, this is about the man who was accused of killing him and at least 18 other people.

Today we're talking about a member of the Gambino family, Salvatore Gravano, also known as Sammy to his family and friends, or Sammy the Bull.

Sammy was born and raised in Brooklyn.

Now, Brooklyn at this time was controlled by organized crime groups, and the Gambino family was one of them.

And these are crime groups that would operate sort of day to day through intimidation and also doing illegal things like dealing drugs or sex work or operating in various different criminal activities.

Now, growing up, Sammy was completely enamored by these groups.

He saw them, he saw the power they had over people and he wanted a slice of that.

And so growing up, his lifelong ambition was to be in one of these groups and he got to know people in the Gambino family.

Now, at first, Sammy was just kind of a normal kid, he grew up, he went to school, he didn't end up graduating, he actually ended up going into the army but he wasn't there for very long and when he came back home he got himself into the Gambino family pretty quickly.

So as we know, one of the main people in the Gambino family was this guy who we started our case with, Paul.

So I won't go into too much detail about Paul because he's actually not who our case is about, but I will give you a little bit of context.

So Paul was...

In the Gambino family, he was not the leader.

And in fact, the person who was the leader, when he died, he had handed over kind of ownership to Paul.

And this was a real kind of point of contention for the entire mob, the entire group.

This decision kind of split the group.

So Paul was officially the leader, but he was quite hands off.

Instead of getting involved and being like any other leader, he really kind of sat back.

He had his massive mansion.

He made loads of money through other people doing the work and then giving him a cut.

Paul made his money by intimidating people, making them fear him.

And he'd always done that.